We asked ourselves: Is it possible to exploit modern JavaScript
engines and build a high-performance analytics database that runs
completely in the browser? Our answer is Afterburner, a
prototype analytical RDBMS implemented in JavaScript that executes
completely inside a web browser, is standards compliant, and has no
external dependencies. Afterburner generates compiled query plans
that exploit two JavaScript features:
typed arrays and
asm.js.

How fast is Afterburner? Based on a standard data warehousing
benchmark (TPC-H), our systems is comparable in performance (query
latency) to an open-source columnar analytical database (MonetDB)
running natively on the same machine! For more details, see: